the quintessence of experience and thought expressed in great
works of art is gathered up and preserved, as Milton said, for "a life
beyond life."

Now, it is upon this imperishable food which the past has stored up
through the genius of great artists that later generations feed and
nourish themselves. It is through intimate contact with these
fundamental conceptions, worked out with such infinite pain and
patience, that the individual experience is broadened to include the
experience of the race. This contact is the mystery as it is the
source of culture. No one can explain the transmission of power from a
book to a reader; but all history bears witness to the fact that such
transmissions are made. Sometimes, as during what is called the
Revival of Learning, the transmission is so general and so genuine
that the life of an entire society is visibly quickened and enlarged;
indeed, it is not too much to say that an entire civilisation feels
the effect. The transmission of power, the transference of vitality,
from books to individuals are so constant and common that they are
matters of universal experience. Most men of any considerable culture
date the successive enlargements of their intellectual lives from the
reading, at successive periods, of the books of insight and
power,--the books that deal with life at firsthand. There are, for
instance, few men of a certain age who have read widely or deeply who
do not recall with perennial enthusiasm the days when Carlyle and
Emerson fell into their hands. They may have reacted radically from
the didactic teaching of both writers, but they have not lost the
impulse, nor have they parted with the enlargement of thought received
in those first rapturous hours of discovery. There was wrought in them
then changes of view, expansions of nature, a liberation of life which
can never be lost. This experience is repeated so long as the man
retains the power of growth and so long as he keeps in contact with
the great writers. Every such contact marks a new stage in the process
of culture. This means not merely the deep satisfaction and delight
which are involved in every fresh contact with a genuine work of art;
it means the permanent enrichment of the reader. He has gained
something more lasting than pleasure and more valuable than
information: he has gained a new view of life; he has looked again
into the heart of humanity; he has felt afresh the supreme interest
which always attache